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Upcoming Changes to the Catalogs and Tips on How to Find Things

As we return from a record breaking VMworld Europe in Barcelona, I wanted to take a minute to talk about some of the new catalogs you will be seeing in the Hands-on Lab Online Portal in the coming weeks as we start to release the new labs.

This year we have over 80 new labs in the 2017 Hands-on Labs Catalog and based on feedback we received from you, our users, we still needed a better way to break up the content in the catalog listings to make things easier to find. For example, we have 44 labs in the Software Defined Data Center catalog. Searching through that catalog and trying to find the bit of content you are looking for can be a daunting task! For those that are not familiar with what the catalog structure looks like today, here is how we have things laid out.

We have four main catalogs, SDDC, Hybrid Cloud, Mobility and Challenge. There is a fifth catalog, Focus Labs, we populate with the latest and most popular labs. You can start to see the difficulty in finding 80+ labs in only four very generic catalogs.

We tested the new catalog listings at VMworld and from the feedback we received from attendees, it made finding labs around specific products or features much easier. So here are the new catalogs and what contents you may expect to find in them:

vSphere with Operations Management, Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Performance

Software Defined Data Center

Solution Labs

Labs focused on solving business challenges with VMware Solutions

Software Defined Data Center, Mobility, Hybrid Cloud

Unified Endpoint Management

VMware AirWatch

Mobility

I also wanted to share a couple of additional tips that may come in handy. The first is the search feature. You can use the search box to find a lab by SKU (i.e. HOL-1810-01-SDC) or by product or keyword. Be sure to click the ‘ALL LABS’ link first, so your search will be across all the catalogs.

In this example, after clicking on the ALL LABS link, I searched for ‘firewall’. This will bring up any labs that include the term ‘firewall’ in the lab title, description or module listing. This can also be used to search for product names, like NSX or a lab SKU.

If you have taken a lab and would like to find other labs that are based on the same product, you can use the ‘Lab Details’ section.

In the Products section, you will see the major products featured in the lab. Click on the product you are interested in and you will be shown all the other labs that include that product. By clicking on vRealize Log Insight, I’m given this listing of labs:

When you find a lab that interests you, just click on the link and you will be brought right to the lab details page for the lab, where you can enroll to take the lab.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for updates! The new labs will be here before you know it!

About Dave Rollins

Dave Rollins is a Content Architect for the Hands-on Labs team in Technical Marketing at VMware. He has worked for various VMware Partners along with hardware and software manufacturers before finding a home at VMware.